Clara Ponty
The Embrace (Philips 538 849)

Daughter of Jean-Luc Ponty and winner of the "Most Attractive New Age Pianist" award two years running (though seeing as the competetion was Kitaro, Lorie Line, and George Winston, it wasn't the most hotly-contested category in whatever theoretical awards show I just made up solely to enable myself to disappear into the vacuum of this tangent, right off the bat), Clara Ponty is one of the more recommendable contemporary instrumental performers, though that's not to say the music is amazing or groundbreaking. It's very pleasant, especially when it focuses primarily on solo piano (her debut CD was entirely piano solos, and it's hard to make a bad solo piano disc, the notable exception being 40 Cats and 50 Monkeys Play 30 Pianos, Featuring Guest Pianist 1 Rhino – that album is no good).

The Embrace is her second disc, and it's fine, entrancing in parts, beguiling in others, boring in many others. This one suffers a bit from having additional instrumentation that renders it just another new age keyboard CD. Some of it sounds a bit like a soundtrack to an afterschool special about diet pill abuse.

Ponty's style most closely resembles George Winston's, though a bit more ethereal rather than down-homey. There's a couple of really good cuts on this disc – the title track and a Fauré tune called "Les Berceaux" – but overall there's not much here unless you're looking for an innocuous background disc (in which case I would recommend, like, Satie or something instead).

I think most people who get this disc will find it pretty, while the rest will find Clara Ponty pretty. That's no reason to buy a CD though, as I learned the hard way with the entire Reese Witherspoon catalog – especially Reese's Pieces, that one was just terrible. Sure, it didn't actually exist either, but that didn't stop it from sucking.

Loud Bassoon rating scale

Review by Ross Ditherspoon